Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [74]
THE COLONEL’S JOB AS contributing editor of a serious, not to say sedate, weekly journal enabled him to stay in touch with current affairs and write about them. He commuted into Manhattan on Tuesdays and Fridays, usually by automobile. When the roads were icy he took the train, hanging on a strap like any other citizen, but suffering because fellow travelers would not leave him alone. In The Outlook’s headquarters at 287 Fourth Avenue he could at least control whom he wanted to see. Ray Stannard Baker, watching him hold court there one morning, was struck by the executive charade:
He is a sort of president-regent—“one vested with vicarious authority.” In some ways he possesses more power than the president, for he is essentially the real leader of the people. And yet he really has no power at all.… Somehow I felt, as I sat there today, that his work had passed its apex: that he could not return to his former power. There was a lack, somewhere, of his old grip on things. The movement has gone beyond him!
Roosevelt was not deceived as to his polarizing effect on public opinion. Passions aroused by last November’s election still ran high in New York City. He joked to O. K. Davis that he could not leave the building without provoking someone. “If I go down by the side elevator, that is evidence of furtiveness. If I go down in front, that is proof of ostentation.”
He worked hard for his $12,000 salary, always delivering copy on time, and soliciting articles from other progressive writers. “There is no fake in Roosevelt’s reference,” a fellow editor remarked. “His memory is prodigious. He can meet any man—any specialist on his own ground.” Lyman and Lawrence Abbott, the father-son duo in charge of The Outlook, valued him as a precious resource. They knew that glossier periodicals had offered him four, if not five times as much money as they could afford. He told them he found their moralistic brand of progressivism congenial. However spent a political force (and they were not sure that he was), Theodore Roosevelt had made The Outlook one of the most influential organs in the country.
In January alone, he reviewed a book on the subject of foreign disaster relief, wrote three articles for a new series entitled “Nationalism and Progress,” and published the texts of his exchange with Governor Baldwin. These contributions were meant to show that he had lost none of his radical fervor, and to prevent La Follette from co-opting one of progressivism’s prime issues: that of employers’ liability.
ROOSEVELT WAS PLEASED to hear in February that African Game Trails, which had been named 1910’s “Book of the Year” by the New York Herald, had sold 36,127 copies in all editions. Charles Scribner sent him a royalty check for $28,620, and wrote that the book was still moving off the shelves.
“It is a great sight to see a lion coming on with his mane all bristling, and his teeth showing, with one of those grunting roars,” the Colonel told an audience of enraptured children on Washington’s Birthday. “A great sight.” Showing a fair number of teeth himself, he regaled his audience with stories, alternately frightening and funny, about his year in Africa. The children were in stitches at his descriptions of man-eater attacks on Indian employees of the Uganda Railway. “A lion came up and tried to get inside the station [at Voi] and the Hindoo inside sent an agitated telegram running, ‘Lion fighting station. Help urgently necessary.’ ”
The more the great safari receded into memory, the more he accepted that he was living in a state of anticlimax. Whether this would prove a permanent condition, he could not tell, but he clearly had no future in active politics as long as Taft maintained a semblance of control over the Republican Party, and progressives continued to be disappointed in him. He could at least look forward to the doubtful satisfaction of becoming an elder statesman.
AROUND THIS TIME Roosevelt became disapprovingly aware of a new, legalistic peace-advocacy group. It styled itself “The American Society for Judicial Settlement of